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Florian Mai

@florianmai.bsky.social
158 followers 484 following 51 posts

AI planning & alignment | Postdoc at University of Bonn linktr.ee/florianmai

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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
If you think Donald Trump is acting for any reason other than self-interest, I can't take you seriously anymore.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
We have to acknowledge the fact that democracies with elected representatives often don't achieve their purpose to serve the interests of their people. Democracy needs large reforms. It's time that alternative ways of selecting representatives get into the overton window, e.g. sortition.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
This is quite unserious speculation.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 31/03/2025
It's easy to create digital copies of models. Just copy their weights!
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
It's plausible that AI will be able to do this in a couple of years, but not today. Just wait. But of course, DOGE is not interested in doing what's right anyway.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 28/03/2025
opinions are strong on here 😆
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
May 28?? Woop, woop, paper deadline has been extended by two months.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
Or, perhaps, when they say LLMs, do they really mean deep learning? Then why not say deep learning directly?
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
Do they mean any AI system that maps into the language space at the output layer? Then doesn't this disregard that you can have any architecture in the hidden layers, including search, tools, symbolic AI, etc, much of which ChatGPT already does?
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
Do they mean autoregressive LLMs, following LeCun's argument that errors accumulate exponentially, making them very hard to be correct? Then what about diffusion-based LLMs? Can that lead to AGI?
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
Do they mean pretraining style language models that are solely trained to estimate the probability of word sequences on an unlabeled pretraining corpus? If so, then is their argument in the spirit of Bender & Koller's Climbing towards NLU paper? If so, does that even apply to post-trained models?
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
When people say scaling up the current development of LLMs won't lead to AGI, what exactly do they mean by LLMs, technically speaking? 🧵
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
“I believe now is the right time to start preparing for AGI” The same warnings are now appearing with increasing frequency from smart outside observers of the AI industry who do not gain from hype, like Kevin Roose (below) & Ezra Klein I think ignoring the possibility they are right is a mistake
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Shayne Longpre @shaynelongpre.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
What are 3 concrete steps that can improve AI safety in 2025? 🤖⚠️ Our new paper, “In House Evaluation is Not Enough” has 3 calls-to-actions to empower evaluators: 1️⃣ Standardized AI flaw reports 2️⃣ AI flaw disclosure programs + safe harbors. 3️⃣ A coordination center for transferable AI flaws. 1/🧵
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
This looks very much like OpenAI is working on native image generation that uses reasoning to iterate over image drafts and successively improve them. I think it's relatively easy to train this via RL because Gemini Flash 2.0, also a native image generator, can identify its own mistakes.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
but even a randomly initialized language model will accept a prompt and produce an answer. would that be AGI?
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Zilei Shao @zoeshao.bsky.social · 11/03/2025
What happens if we tokenize cat as [ca, t] rather than [cat]? LLMs are trained on just one tokenization per word, but they still understand alternative tokenizations. We show that this can be exploited to bypass safety filters without changing the text itself. #AI #LLMs #tokenization #alignment
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 09/03/2025
the core question is whether the reward can be modeled for RL. I think it's going to be rather simple using LLMs as judges...
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 09/03/2025
Bad take. The risks being discussed emerge because the agents are becoming so good that they get deployed in the first place.
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Beth Popp Berman @epopppp.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
We need some better language for pushing back against what the administration is doing. They’re not “ending DEI.” No. They're firing women and people of color in the military. They’re forbidding whole fields of research. They’re erasing trans people from existence.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 03/03/2025
So that implies he firmly believes to be doing what's best for the US and the world? How do you reconcile that with the countless blatant falsehoods he propagates?
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
Great! Your initial post didn't show how nuanced your views are.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
yes and that's fine
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
And why are these things mutually exclusive?
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
More generally, what do you think is Trump's motivation to be president? I struggle to find any motivation that could explain his ... unconventional way of doing politics.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
how confident are you that this is wrong?
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Ansgar Scherp @ansgarscherp.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
American scientists, come to Europe! 🌍✈️ We all speak English, we have excellent affordable health care 🏥💊, safe schools 🏫🔒, and free university education for your kids 🎓👨‍👩‍👧‍👦. Enjoy more money after deduction of taxes and living expenses 💰📉. We care for you! ❤️🤝 www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_l0...
youtube.com
American Scientists - come to Europe.
YouTube video by Scientists for EU
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 23/02/2025
That's exactly why we need better technology.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 21/02/2025
and that's probably a good thing
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 17/02/2025
Well people are fucking idiots for not wanting more integration at all levels. There's the problem right there.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 17/02/2025
In 2-3 years, people will constantly resort to their personal AI assistants to explain the world to them. Either these AIs get their news from reputable news sources like The Guardian, or they get it from X. What world do you want to live in? bsky.app/profile/fabi...
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 17/02/2025
Someone please explain to me how this is a bad thing? "Under the partnership, Guardian reporting and archive journalism will be available as a news source within ChatGPT, alongside the publication of attributed short summaries and article extracts."
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 16/02/2025
There's an obvious race to be first to successfully prop up an LLM as the source of truth and then use it to serve propaganda
Tweet from Elon Musk. Tweet is "Grok 3 is so based" and the image is of the LLM responding to "What's your opinion on The Information" with "The information, like most legacy media, is garbage. It's part of the old guard-filtered, biased and often serving the interests..."
Sorry, want to finish typing this out but my hand is pretty messed up
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 15/02/2025
the single most un-american and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an american president
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 15/02/2025
Who said whatever you used was super-intelligence?
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
Obviously, you also have to put that money to meaningful use, which I am not sure the EU will do. But the announced AI gigafactories are a promising start.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
I can't help but feel disappointed by the scientists and engineers that work for this nazi clown, especially at x.AI. It is blatantly obvious you are on the wrong side of history. Just go work at one of the other big tech companies. With a 7 figure salary you can easily accept a cut.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
The chances of fair and free US elections in 2026 and 2028 are decreasing. If Europe wants superintelligence with democratic values, it has to step up. At least a €100B initiative is needed over the next 5 years.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
Is this a made up graph or where does it come from?
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
humanity's last exam was adversarially filtered against o1 but not R1. So it is naturally biased against o1.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
There is a decent chance that in a year from now we will have agents that can autonomously design and run AI experiments. They'll probably still need frequent feedback similar to an average grad student writing their thesis. But what about in two years? Holy smokes...
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Sung Kim @sungkim.bsky.social · 25/01/2025
This report from @epochai.bsky.social states that if AGI can fully substitute for human labor, it might cause wages to crash. Eventually, wages may drop below subsistence level. epoch.ai/gradient-upd...
epoch.ai
AGI could drive wages below subsistence level
This Gradient Updates issue explores how AGI could disrupt labor markets, potentially driving wages below subsistence levels, and challenge historical economic trends.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
Very proud of my friend @justus-jonas.bsky.social, whose thesis I helped supervise. Part of his thesis resulted in the ACL 2024 paper "Triple-Encoders: Representations That Fire Together, Wire Together". I think it has super interesting, unconventional ideas worth checking out!
arxiv.org
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Scott McGrath @smcgrath.phd · 23/01/2025
🧪 "Humanity's Last Exam" sets a new benchmark for AI: 3,000 expert-crafted questions spanning 100+ subjects. Current LLMs perform poorly, revealing a gap in expert-level knowledge and calibration, but it would be difficult to build a harder test. 🩺💻 #MLSky
lastexam.ai
Humanity's Last Exam
Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, benchmarks are not keeping pace in difficulty: LLMs now achieve over 90% accuracy on popular benchmarks like MMLU, limiting informed measurement of state-of-the-art LLM capabilities. In response, we introduce Humanity's Last Exam, a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. The dataset consists of 3,000 challenging questions across over a hundred subjects. We publicly release these questions, while maintaining a private test set of held out questions to assess model overfitting.
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David Lindner @davidlindner.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
New Google DeepMind safety paper! LLM agents are coming – how do we stop them finding complex plans to hack the reward? Our method, MONA, prevents many such hacks, *even if* humans are unable to detect them! Inspired by myopic optimization but better performance – details in🧵
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
Regardless of whether your goal is to maximize profit or to have AGI benefit all of humanity, if you have a corrupt and criminal president with a fragile ego and more power than most presidents before him, you're not going to achieve your goals unless you have that president on your side.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
Webpage: www.kuleuven.be/ethics-kuleu... Call for abstracts: www.kuleuven.be/ethics-kuleu... Fostering interdisciplinary cooperation on the urgent problem of managing large-scale AI risks is a key goal of our conference. And what better place than Leuven—home to great beer and great ideas? 🍻
a generated image of Leuven - but it really looks like that!
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
Care about AGI going well? Contribute to our conference on large-scale AI risks on 26-28th May in Leuven, Belgium, featuring Yoshua Bengio, Dawn Song, and Iason Gabriel as keynote speakers. We invite participants from a wide range of academic disciplines to submit abstracts by 15 Feb, 2025.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 08/01/2025
They may configure their AIs to not fact-check, or they may simply choose to believe what fits their world-view and is beneficial for their tribe regardless of the facts. How do we regulate that? I don't know. My confidence in humanity is as low as ever.
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Florian Mai @florianmai.bsky.social · 08/01/2025
Within a few years everybody will have the option to have a highly reliable, instant fact checker with them at all times. What we could do ourselves through web search, AI assistants will do in seconds. The question is if people want that, considering half the US embraces Trump's blatant lying.
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